Bangkok... the crazy city that shows up in movies and documentaries for so many different reasons! We were obviously curious about visiting Bangkok... our initial plan was to start our visit to Thailand via Bangkok but due to the schedule with DinDang we postponed our visit to our second time in Thailand (around April/May). As we have been realizing, plans change all the time while travelling and after the motorbike accident in Krabi we didn't have the energy to visit the islands and Bangkok seemed a nice place to visit... We also started to get really curious about shopping in Thailand and everybody told us that the best place to shop was in Bangkok... after a few days recovering from the accident, we bought our bus ticket! We only had two days and a half to visit the city and we knew we would be back to Bangkok soon so we focused our stay in visiting some markets and do everything in a very relaxed way...
We arrived in Bangkok at 5am, after a 10h bus trip... as usual, we didn't have a booked room so we followed the indication of our book "Southeast Asia on a budget" from rough guides and he headed to Kao San Road... a street that supposedly had a lot of life and entertainment. As soon as we got to the street we realized how true that was, there was still a bunch of people in the street having their last beers, some having a foot massage to relax from the dance clubs and others enjoying drunk food from the street stalls... we walked through the street hoping to find a place to stay but 5am is not a good time to find a hotel... they were either expensive (above 600 baht/night +- $17/night) or full... more or less an hour later we were close to give up and seat in a restaurant to wait until noon (check out time, where hotels become available again) but, a very nice guy saw us looking for rooms and recommend us to go to the other side of the neighborhood... he said that rooms there were much cheaper and that there was less noise. We followed his recommendation and immediately found a room with private toilet for 300baht/night... exactly what we wanted!!
We slept to recover from the trip but we didn't want to waste time at the hotel so we made ourselves wake up at noon to start visiting the streets of Bangkok. We started by walking around our neighborhood that was now full of life... food stalls everywhere, small street shops full of amazing clothes and people everywhere.
After exploring our neighborhood and having a delecious Egg Vegetarian Padthai for 30 baths (amazing), we got on a tuk-tuk (long time since we took a tuk-tuk) until Chinatown... as usual, Chinatown was a bit messy... a lot of people, colors and smells. We visited it for a while but we are not great fans of Chinatowns... there was really nothing that we wanted to buy and we never feel very confortable in trying the food there, except some tiny pancakes that we tried for 10 baht that were delicious (at least they didn't look like weird parts of animals like all the other food).
Tired of walking after a long trip, we went back to our hotel to rest a little bit so that we were able to explore our "crazy" neighborhood at night. Fully recovered, we left the hotel for dinner but in Bangkok it is hard to go simply for dinner... the crowd, the stores, the music and the energy around pull you for a few drinks... and since we are in this trip to enjoy, we just went with the flow... one beer... two beers... three beers... and suddenly we were trying BUGS... we tried larvs, crickets and a big grasshopper! It was weird but it tasted like chips.
Our second day was purely for shopping, we went to the famous Chatuchak Weekend Market, one of the biggest markets in the world... there we were able to find nice pieces of clothes for good prices but you can find everything... from clothes to furniture, jewelry to animals, etc, etc, etc... we spent hours there. It was nice but we were expecting to be able to bargain much more than we did.
The rest of the day we used our time to buy a few things that we needed around Kao San Road.
As a first impression, Bangkok was nice... a great city to party with friends, an awesome place to go shopping and to be introduced to the Southeast Asia culture. Amazing and cheap street food and a lot of other tourists to meet. It is cheap to eat in the food stalls that are everywhere but it is very easy to "lose control" and end up spending money in beers and party.
So far, in Thailand, the culture shock has been very little, maybe because the 4 months and a half in India prepared us very well or just because Thailand became very touristic. Although, in Bangkok, we had our first contact with ladyboys and with the way that they are treated in their society which has surprised us in a good way.
We only saw half or a quarter of the city but we will be back at least for two times so we have time to live Bangkok...
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